Resources to inject real life detail into your fiction

Archive for the category “Military History”

British cavalry passing the ruins of Albert cathedral, France, during World War I

Peering through the list of searches that bring people to this website, I find that the second most popular search in the past 30 days has been “public domain images first world war military”

Generally speaking, any image published before 1923 is in the public domain. Additionally, any photographs taken by US government employees, including soldiers and sailors, in the course of their work is also public domain.

As a result, any images you find my entries tagged World War I ought to have some public domain photos. Some of the resources here most useful for getting images are:

What is the correct way to disassemble, then reassemble your character’s M16?

What should your character do if her M16 jams?

What does LSA stand for, and how does it help your character’s M16?

What are some ways to keep your character’s ammo magazines dry?

Description:

This particular maintenance guide was put together by Will Eisner. It does offer very specific and seemingly easy to follow guidance on maintaining a weapon and will familiarize you and your character with M16 parts and common problems.

Be cautioned that it is a product of its times and plays on racial (Vietnamese) and gender stereotypes to drum up interest for the army guys that were reading it.

What might have it been like to be an US Asian-American GI in World War II?

What was it like to be a POW during the Iraq or Afghanistan wars?

Description:

Click on the “Search the Veterans Collection” to get started. This brings you to a page with three tabs: Search, Browse, and Help.

The database is searchable by keyword, either by all fields together or by a specific field. You can also limit by the following criteria:

Conflict or Era (WWI through the Iraq and Afghanistan wars)

Branch of the Service

Prisoner of War y/n

Gender

Digitized Collection y/n

Transcript y/n

You can do a search with just the limiters and no keywords. This can be useful for finding POW accounts from women or other specific groups.
For an example search, choose Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, and click “yes” for transcripts. Six on the first page have online materials. If you need something now, say yes to “digitized collection”

Each entry contains: Name of Veteran/Civilian, Service Location: Service Unit/Ship, Highest Rank (in Service), Notes, Name of Interviewer/Donor, Contributor/Interviewer Affiliation and Collection IS Number. Some entries have considerably more information. When online materials are available, they may include a recording of the interview, a transcript or summary or a photo album. The interviews may cover prewar and postwar activities in addition to their lives during war.

On the browse tab, you can browse by last name, by war and military branch, by state of residence, and by race/ethnicity. Available races are Black or African American, White, Asian, Hispanic, American Indian and Alaskan Native, Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander, Other, and Unspecified. Only 20% of the project participants indicated a race. So this browse draws from a smaller pool of veterans.

However you browse, there’s no immediately obvious way to limit your results to items with digital collections. But instant gratification is available. If you look in the upper left hand corner of your search results, you ought to see a small search box with some terms in it already, like +(war:”worldwari”) +(displayBranch:”army nurse corps”). Click at the end of those search terms and type in +(digitalCollection:”yes”). If you want to have a transcript as well, use +(transcript:”yes”) as well.

When browsing by war and service, the available services are:

Air Force (Post WWII)

Air Force Nurse Corps (Post WWII)

Army

Army Air Forces/Corps

Army Nurse Corps

Cadet Nurse Corps

Coast Guard

Marine Corps

Merchant Marine

Navy

Navy Nurse Corps

SPAR (Women’s Coast Guard Reserve)

WAAC (Women’s Army Auxillary Corps)

WAC (Women’s Army Corps)

WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilots)

Women Marines

Civilian (includes Japanese-Americans interned during WWII.)

All in all, this is just an amazing resource of first person accounts in difficult times and places.

For the most part, these journals will be most helpful in establishing background and mood. All Hands, Naval Aviation News and Naval War College journals will probably be helpful for historical based stories or “How did they do it?” type questions.

Here are a couple of example articles:

Technical Aviation Intelligence: Captured Equipment Reveals Enemy’s Secrets to Buaer’s Air Information Branch. Naval Aviation News. June 1943, page 1. – Provides information on the value of captured enemy equipment to Allied forces and describes in some detail how that value is extracted.

Bureau of Navigation News Bulletin No.1 (Now All Hands) August 30, 1922. A litany of complaints to Navy field personnel including a scolding for not turning in ships logs in the time and manner directed.

On 2d Anniversary… Waves Pass 70,000 All Hands, August 1944, page 8. Article on the Navy Women’s Reserve. Commended or freeing “enough officers and men to man a fleet of 10 battleships, 10 aircraft carriers, 28 cruisers and 50 destroyers.” Details on different types of positions that employed waves including but not limited to radio operators, navigation instructors, dentists, yeomans, chauffeur and film projectionists. Article notes that as of August 1944, Waves were limited to the continental United States

If you don’t have a high-speed internet connection, be aware that some of these magazines, especially the ones digitized from paper, may have large file sizes. For example, the August 1944 issue of “All hands” was 34 MB. Paper copies of most of these magazines ought to be available through Federal Depository Libraries or through interlibrary loan through your local library.

This multivolume work is available online and in paper. From the website:

The Histories Branch researches and writes the multi-volume Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, available in many libraries in the United States and abroad. Compiled like an encyclopedia, each volume includes summary histories of U.S. Navy ships from certain sections of the alphabet. The volumes also include an assortment of appendices on small craft, dictionary entries for Confederate Navy ships and various essays related to naval ships.

Each entry starts with the background on the name of the ship, then a brief physical description, followed by a ship history from keel laying to final disposition (final decommissioning/destruction/sale). In cases where multiple ships have had the same name (I.e Mosquito), ship histories will be separated by roman numerals.

If you station characters on real ships, this book will avoid placing ships in wrong place and time.

Search Tips / Story Ideas

The primary access to this resource is by browsing. There is no official dedicated search to the Dictionary. But you can use Google if you format your search like [keyword/phrase inurl:/ship-histories/danfs site:navy.mil]

This opens up some good possibilities for a writer. Try some of these searches and see if you’re touched with a story idea:

What interrogation techniques have historically produced the best results?

Why is a knowledge of language and culture helpful in interrogations?

What are a few techniques you might use to get information from from someone without making them aware they’re giving something away?

Description:

This National Intelligence University Press publication is well documented with over 450 footnotes. The sources consulted by the three authors included military files from the National Archives, other government documents, memoirs of former interrogators, newspapers and academic journals, and interviews with military officials, former interrogators and Special Forces officers.

Based on a review of documentation concerning fanatical Japanese and VC soldiers, the authors conclude that the most important factors in gaining useful intelligence were deep knowledge of the language and culture of the adversary. Torture and other harsh methods used by the Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese tended to elicit false confessions and information.

For writers, it would be very interesting to read the accounts of German interrogator Hanns Scharf and US interrogator Sergeant Grant Hirabayashi. By all accounts they got great results with similar methods. Here’s how Sgt Hirabayshi got his intelligence:

Throughout the campaign, Hirabayashi interrogated dozens of enemy prisoners. His approach was simple; he always treated POWs with kindness and dignity. First, he made sure prisoners received proper medical care. He frequently offered them cigarettes and asked if they had heard from their families and been able to communicate with them. Many wept because of this unexpected treatment. Hirabayashi explained that prisoners truly believed that U.S. soldiers were going to kill them and noted that the POWs were completely unaware of the rights afforded to them under the rules of international law, codified in the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, 27 July 1929 (the Geneva Convention of 1929).

If you want create an interrogator who is both sympathetic and effective, study this book.

What were some preventative measures taken by the US Army in the American Revolution?

When were US soldiers first vaccinated for smallpox?

What was considered typical care during the Civil War?

What were World War I base camp hospitals like?

Description:

This site is divided into a number of sections, but the most helpful will be:

Books and Documents – materials from Revolutionary times to the the Iraq War. Some representative titles are:

The Evolution of Preventive Medicine in the United States Army, 1607-1939

Medical Men in the American Revolution, 1775-1783 by Louis C. Duncun

Thesis: A Study of the Medical Support to the Union and Confederate Armies During the Battle of Chickamauga: Lessons and Implications for Today’s U.S. Army Medical Department Leaders by David A. Rubenstein

The U.S. Army Medical Department in the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906

Women in the Army Medical Department in World War II

Battle Casualties in Korea: Studies of the Surgical Research Team, Volume II, Tools for Resuscitation

In Their Own Words: The 498th Air Ambulance Company in Iraq, 2003

Historical Art Work – Captioned images and photographs from WWI through the Iraq War. The Office of Medical History discourages the use of this imagery for commercial or partisan publications, but does not disclose their authority for prohibiting these uses.

Medal of Honor recipients – Short citations of medical personnel awarded the Medal of Honor.

Who caught the first maritime prisoners of war during Operation Iraqi Freedom?

Where can I find an oral history of someone later killed in action?

What are the duties of a boarding officer in the Coast Guard?

Description:

Online bookshelf of materials relating to US Coast Guard participation in the invasion of Iraq aka Operation Iraqi Freedom. Links to after action reports, oral histories and lists of units deployed to the Persian Gulf.
This resource will be most useful to writers needing background for stories set in this war. Descriptions of the boarding activities and after action reports may help in military science fiction.

This anthology presents a collection of 21 articles describing the full range of U.S. Marine Corps operations in Iraq from 2004 to 2008. During this period, the Marines conducted a wide variety of kinetic and non-kinetic operations as they fought to defeat the Iraq insurgency, build stability, and lay the groundwork for democratic governance.

The selections in this collection include journalistic accounts, scholarly essays, and Marine Corps summaries of action. Our intent is to provide a general overview to educate Marines and the general public about this critical period in the history of the U.S. Marine Corps, the United States, and Iraq. Many of the conclusions are provisional and are being updated and revised as new information and archival resources become available.

The accompanying annotated bibliography provides a detailed overview of where current scholarship on this period currently stands.

The annotated bibliography runs from page 269 through page 294 and includes primary and secondary sources. The articles and bibliographies offer many differing viewpoints. Between the essays and the bibliography, you ought to be reasonably informed about many aspects of the Iraq War from 2004-2008.

In addition to the articles and annotated bibliography there is a useful “Chronology of Events” starting at page 261.

The web version of the book is presented in seven PDF files. If you’d like a paper copy try interlibrary loan through your local public library.

How did the scale of the Vietnam War compare to that of the Occupation of Iraq?

What tactics did the US use under the pacification of Vietnam?

Who were allies of North and South Vietnam?

Description:

This 76 page study from the Strategic Studies Institute is a compare and contrast to the wars in Iraq and Vietnam and provides a useful background to each conflict. From the introduction:

The authors conclude that the military dimensions of the two conflicts bear little comparison. Among other things, the sheer scale of the Vietnam War in terms of forces committed and losses incurred dwarfs that of the Iraq War. They also conclude, however, that failed U.S. state-building in Vietnam and the impact of declining domestic political support for U.S. war aims in Vietnam are issues pertinent to current U.S. policy in Iraq.

Pages 64-76 of this volume consists of endnotes and references to other works.